Via Sociological Images, an excerpt from research by Cornell professor Suzanne Mettler in which Americans were asked whether they had ever benefited from or participated in specific federal programs. As it turns…

Pulitzer-winning author and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has a revolutionary worldview. In the video below, his recent “Endgame Strategy” piece for AdBusters is read aloud by George Atherton. His conclusions are chilling, but not entirely hopeless. “We will have to take care of ourselves,” he wrote. “We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.

Sociological Images reports on a fascinating study that you may have missed the first time around — the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, which reveals much about the U.S. atheist/agnostic/”spiritual-but-non-religious” population (referred…

ScienceDaily reports: Sexual harassment may have become so commonplace for women that they have built up resistance to harassing behavior they consider merely “bothersome,” suggests a provocative new study by Michigan State…

“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation…

ScienceDaily reports: Philosophers have argued for centuries, millennia actually, about whether our lives are guided by our own free will or are predetermined as the result of a continuous chain of events…

I wonder what the first person to win two Nobel prizes, Madame Curie, would make of this study. Oh, I know the answer from a classic Simpsons episode … Stephanie Pappas writes on LiveScience:

Getting the once-over from a man causes women to score lower on a math test, a new study finds.

Despite this drop in performance, women were more motivated to interact with men who ogled them, perhaps because they were trying to boost their sense of belonging, psychologists report in the February issue of the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly.

“It creates this vicious cycle for women in which they’re underperforming in math or work domains, but they’re continuing to want to interact with the person who is making them underperform in the first place,” study researcher Sarah Gervais, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, told LiveScience.

Site editor’s note: This post from DJ Pangburn originally appeared on death + taxes: The Kennedy assassination and the conspiracies surrounding it are imbued with such meaning for Americans because the distortion…

Joseph Allen writes on Confessions of a CyberCasualty: I recently got my foot smashed to hell while doing something stupid. Crippled and couchbound, I indulged the great American painkiller: Reality Television. That…